SEO doesn’t have to be complicated.

There is no need for you to hire an SEO expert or spend thousands of dollars on your personal website when you can learn how to do it all yourself!

This guide will teach you everything from writing blog posts and mastering meta descriptions to building links and keyword research. 

You’ll also find some tips that are effective with low effort, allowing you to get started quickly – something many newbies struggle with!

Can I do SEO for my website myself?

The answer to this question is yes, you can do SEO for your website yourself if you have a strong handle on the fundamental factors and are willing to perform regular updates to your content and SEO strategy. However, many business owners don’t have the time or resources to devote to SEO, which is why outsourcing it to professionals can be a time-saving opportunity.

How to do SEO on your own? Tips to do SEO optimization yourself

Doing SEO by yourself can be a daunting task. It seems like there are too many things to consider, and it can feel impossible to get your site on page 1 of Google. But don’t worry- you don’t need to be an SEO expert!

With a bit of common sense and some simple tips, you can optimize your website for Google without spending hours on research or struggling against impossible competition.

One of the best things about SEO is that Google tells us what the most popular searches are. This means that you don’t need to spend ages on keyword research – just use the keywords that Google tells you are most popular. Also, it’s important to look at your competition, as this can help you find keywords that you can use. If all you see is authority sites, then there’s no point in trying to compete with them. But if you’re getting minor results first, that’s a good sign that you can rank for those keywords!

Also, review how you can quickly find related or semantically close keywords with an AI writing and SEO platform by Outranking:

It takes time and effort, but it’s worth it in the end. If you’re willing to put in the work, you can see huge results that will help your website succeed. So don’t give up! With a bit of hard work and some simple tips, like Outranking’s step-by-step on-page optimization guidance, you can do SEO optimization yourself and attain great results.

Set up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a must-have for SEO. Google Analytics provides information that’s useful for SEO, such as website traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates. It offers many features and benefits, such as understanding user behavior, tracking website traffic, and finding keyword opportunities. Additionally, you can use annotations to mark when you’ve started new phases of your SEO strategy and see how those changes have affected your site.

Google Analytics helps track traffic to your site, and it provides valuable information that’s useful for SEO. By understanding where users are coming from and what they’re doing on your website, you can improve your SEO strategy to better meet their needs.

By using Google Analytics, you can find keyword opportunities on internal site searches by tracking the keywords that convert the best and seeing which pages need further optimization. Finally, Google Analytics is a great starting point for SEO work: 80% of searchers use Google, so it’s important to understand how many people are coming from this source. By understanding where your visitors are coming from, you can create better content and target your marketing efforts more effectively.

Google Analytics helps you learn where your visitors come from, segment your customer base, create campaigns, and set and track goals. All of this information is valuable for improving your SEO performance.

Optimize your website for speed

Google is highly critical of websites that take a long time to load, and this can hurt your search engine rankings. In order to optimize your user experience and search engine rankings, your site speed should be optimized. You can use a service like GTmetrix to scan your website for quick performance solutions.

Hosting servers are the most important factor in determining website performance. A powerful hosting server can improve website optimization, so I recommend SiteGround for WordPress sites because of its fast server speeds and competitive pricing.

If your site is built on software like Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy Website Builder, then it might be slow due to the way the software has been coded. These builders often produce sites that are slow and difficult to optimize. I recommend WordPress instead because it is a more powerful platform that can be easily optimized for page speed.

Optimize your website for mobile

Google’s mobile-first index is now preferred for seeing how search engines rank websites. This means that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s likely that your site will drop in the ranking on Google search results pages. A responsive theme will work on any screen size and make it easy for visitors to access your website on their smartphone or tablet devices.

To test whether your website is mobile-friendly, Google has created a free tool called the Mobile-Friendly Test. The test provides a screenshot of how the page looks on mobile and any issues with page loading. You can also use the test to find out what changes Google recommends for your website.

One easy way to make sure your website is fast and mobile-friendly is to check your caching policy. This will help ensure optimal performance when users visit your website. Allowing caching helps mobile sites load faster, which means a faster load time for your site.

Create the site map for your website

A sitemap of your website lists all of your pages so that Google can discover them. It’s also a good idea to submit your sitemap to Google so they can include it in their search results.

Creating a sitemap for your website can be very useful when you are trying to earn links. You want to research topics about statistics, data, and trends in your industry because these topics have the highest link intent. With the help of Ahrefs, you can create a good sitemap for your website.

Claim your Google My Business Local Listing

Google My Business is free and allows businesses to take control of their presence on Google. With Google My Business, businesses can add their contact information, website, and other relevant details. This is a great way to make sure that users see the right information when they search for your business on Google.

Start content creation by picking a niche and choosing a seed or target keyword

Most SEO campaigns begin with keyword research. This is when you find the most popular words or phrases your target customers use when searching for what you do. The goal is to identify which keywords have the potential to bring in the most traffic and convert best.

The process of keyword research usually goes something like this: find a bunch of seed keywords, enter them into an SEO keyword strategy tool to generate more ideas, then evaluate and prioritize them. Picking a seed keyword list can be relatively easy. You can start by asking two questions: “How would people search for you if they want to find your website (or a similar website)?” and “How would people describe your product or service?”

Another way to generate your initial seed keyword list is to look at the keywords you’re already ranking for. This can be a great starting point, especially if you’re looking to expand into new markets or niches.

Finally, you can also pick a seed keyword list based on your target audience. This can be done by surveying your customers or looking at common search terms used on social media sites and discussion forums.

Once you have a solid list of seed keywords, it’s time to start using a keyword research tool. This will help you expand your list and identify related keywords that you may not have considered. The best part is that many of these tools are free to use.

Track your competitors

As an online business owner, it’s essential to track your competitors. SpyFu is a great tool that can help you do just that. It provides detailed information about what your competitors are doing in organic search, including what content themes they are targeting and how their sites are structured. This information can be invaluable in shaping your own SEO initiatives.

One of the best ways to identify your competitors is to think about what types of products or services they offer and what keywords they are targeting. You can also look at how the sites structure their pages to target certain keywords. By doing this, you can get a good idea of what type of content you need to create in order to compete with them.

Looking at competitors is an essential part of the SEO process. Competitors provide ideas for your own products and site info that can improve the user experience. Keep a close eye on them and use what you learn to your advantage.

Perfect keyword research

Keyword research shows you the best keywords to target based on traffic or clicks potential.

Keyword research is the process of identifying keywords that your customers search and click. This gives you an idea of what people are searching for and how competitive those keywords are. Armed with this information, you can target the best keywords for your business and start your journey to page one.

There are a number of free keyword research tools online. These tools can help you get started, but they have their limits. The free version often won’t give you the same results as you would get by using the premium version or hiring an SEO expert. So be sure to use them as a starting point, but don’t consider them the end-all-be-all of your research.

The most important thing to remember is that SEO is a journey, and the key to success is taking it one step at a time. So get started with keyword research, and see where it takes you!

Create content around long-tail keywords and questions

Google wants its users to be happy. That’s why it strives to serve the most relevant content for each query. If you want your website to rank well on Google, you need to create content that matches search intent.

The “long tail” refers to the many search results pages that are not as highly targeted as the pages for the most popular search terms. The most relevant content for each query is served by Google, so we can take advantage of that.

Long-tail keywords are often found in question-and-answer posts. If you want to rank for long-tail keywords, your best bet is to create list-based or question-based blog posts. Listicles are popular because they’re easy to read, and they increase your chances of ranking with long-tail keywords.

Create a content plan

Creating a content plan is one of the most important things you can do for your website as part of your SEO content strategy. A content calendar will help you map out when you want to post, as well as what keywords you want to target. The best way to create a content calendar is with a spreadsheet, which allows you to plan up to a year or more at a time.

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract and retain customers. When done correctly, it involves creating valuable, informative, and interesting content that potential consumers will want to read. The goal is to educate and inform people so they may eventually become customers.

A content plan is a schedule that includes dates for creating content, such as articles, posts, and videos. It’s important to be flexible and to adjust your content plan depending on what you’re writing about and how much time you have available. Having a schedule gives you an idea of what you can produce in the near future, which speeds up the process of creating content. The content calendar is a good place to start, which can help you get organized and improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).

Use keywords to create content ideas

Use keywords to generate content ideas. Seed keywords are the foundation of your keyword research.

Coming up with an initial seed keyword list is relatively easy by just asking: What are some websites that people might search for, and what do people want to find on those sites? Seed keywords are the foundation of keyword research and will help generate more keyword ideas.

When brainstorming, use questions such as “How would people search for me if they wanted to find my website or a website similar to mine?”

We also suggest generating your initial seed keyword list by looking at the keywords you are currently ranking for. You can use a tool like Google Search Console or Ahrefs Site Explorer to help generate your initial seed keyword list.

Prepare a content calendar

Prepare a content calendar to map out what and when to post. Use a spreadsheet or text document for planning. You can do this quarterly, yearly, or as needed.

A content calendar is a visual representation of your plan. Dates of posts, keyword ideas, and keyword data are entered into the spreadsheet.

A content calendar helps you to make sure you don’t miss any important dates in your writing process. It’s good to be flexible and change things up when it makes sense, but having a content calendar will help you plan your articles faster.

Blog regularly and create tons of quality content

If you’re looking to improve your website’s SEO, it’s important to blog regularly and create tons of quality content. This will help you push up fresh, relevant content for the search engines to index, which can in turn help improve your site’s ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

When writing blog posts, it’s important to keep your ideal buyer in mind. Try to think about the challenges they face every day and write blog posts that offer actionable solutions. You should also avoid keyword stuffing and instead select a primary keyword that you want to rank for by using research from Google Trends. This will give you the best chance of your content being discovered by people who are looking for information on that topic.

In addition to blogging regularly, it’s important to create lots of quality content. This could include blog posts, articles with lists, easy-to-save infographics, thorough guides, e-books, and evergreen content. Consistent quality content can help you build authority and attract more visitors to your website.

“Quality content” means factual, actionable blog posts. When you’re creating this type of content, it’s important to be consistent in terms of quality and cadence. This will help you build backlinks for your website over time and keep up with your competitors’ backlink activity.

To stay up to date on your website’s SEO, it’s important to use a tool like Monitor Backlinks. This will help you keep track of your site’s backlink activity and make sure you’re doing everything possible to improve your site’s ranking on the SERPs.

Optimize on-page SEO elements

On-page SEO optimizations are important for getting your website ranked higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). When you optimize your website’s on-page elements, you make it easier for Google and other search engines to understand what your site is about. This, in turn, can help you rank higher for the keywords that are most important to you.

There are a number of different on-page SEO optimizations that you can make. The most important ones include updating the content on your pages to include your target keywords, creating new pages for unassigned keywords, and launching a new, keyword-rich section of your websites, such as a blog or education portal.

You should also make sure that all of your website’s on-page elements are correctly formatted. This includes the titles, meta descriptions, headings, and images. By taking the time to optimize your posts for SEO before you publish them, you won’t have to go back later and fix them. And, best of all, optimizing your posts will help you rank higher for the keywords that are most important to you. You can do all of the above yourself by simply using an SEO writing checker.

Optimize each page for the focus keyword

Search engine-optimized content can lead to a higher ranking on Google. Optimize the on-page elements such as the structure and code, and ensure that the content is related to the focus keyword. The goal of this optimization is to create pages that rank for a specific keyword.

On-page optimization includes steps such as ensuring that content, structure, code, and other elements are optimized for search engines. Using the wrong keyword strategy can result in a loss of rankings.

Traditional SEO is no longer relevant for the process of optimizing your content. Instead, keywords are now linked to synonyms and semantically related words. Google understands synonyms and semantically related words, making keyword stuffing unnecessary.

Follow the tips below:

• Make sure your title has a clear and concise focus keyword.
• Write about something related to the focus keyword.
• Use keywords in your body text.

Optimize your title tags and meta descriptions

Title tags and meta descriptions are important because they affect search engines. Google truncates both after a certain length, so keep them short! The SERP simulator is a tool that helps determine if your title tag and meta description are within the boundaries of Google. Power words are words that evoke an emotional response from readers, and you should use them in your title tag. Including your target keyword is not an absolute requirement, but it’s another good way to show the user that you’re the most relevant result for their search. Bonus; Check out this article and learn more about how to optimize your blog post title.

Create readable URLs

An important thing about a website is how it is structured. A URL tells you what to expect from a web page, and users are more likely to click on a result that clearly demonstrates what they should expect from the page. It is important to make sure your URLs are readable, friendly, and include relevant words (keywords) that correlate to the copy of the website.

The example below shows how someone might search for “red men’s socks,” which would direct them to a page with a URL like this:

https://www.sockshop.co.uk/shop/mens-socks/colour/red

Short URLs are easier to type and read.

A lower-ranked URL looks like this:

https://www.kohls.com/catalog/mens-red-socks-hosiery-clothing.jsp?CN=Gender:Mens+Color:Red+Category:Socks%20%26%20Hosiery+Department:Clothing

The higher-ranking Sockshop URL has a structure that is descriptive and concise, which helps it outrank the Kohl’s page.

Avoid extra symbols and unnecessary words such as “and” or “the.”

If you need to separate words in your URL use hyphens instead of underscores, as Google might have a hard time recognizing them and not indexing your page.

To summarize:

• Keep URLs simple and readable.
• Avoid extra spaces.
• Use custom links to avoid long URLs.

Outranking’s step-by-step Optimization workflow includes URL optimization:

Research your competitors’ content by using SERP analysis

Competing on SERPs can be an effective way to gain a competitive edge. The best way is to research your competitors is by using keyword analysis tools. When you are not sure what terms your ideal customers are searching for, try looking for them on search engines like Google and Bing.

To find out how competitive a term is, use a tool for SERP analysis. This process can be time-consuming, as you have to constantly sort through a never-ending list of results, but if done correctly, it can help you gain a competitive edge.

The best way to research your competitors is by using keyword analysis tools. You should base your content on personal experience and listen to clients’ questions and queries.

Here’s a 1-minute video showing how to use the research feature for content, SERP, and off-Page Research in Outranking:

Create SEO-optimized outlines with the right keywords

Search intent is what the searcher wants from Google, and it must be matched in content. To optimize your SEO efforts, you must understand the searcher’s intent when searching for a particular keyword or phrase. This can be done by conducting a search for related keywords that offer similar information, as well as looking at the competition for the specific keyword.

It’s not as difficult as it seems because Google wants its users to be happy. The best way to optimize SEO is to use keywords that are relevant to the content. It’s important to understand what people want to see in a SERP for your target keyword and how that matches up with your content.

A list-based blog post is often the best way to optimize for a domain name keyword. List-based blog posts are likely to be seen by search algorithms. You must create the perfect title and meta description, as well as choose relevant keywords so that the content can rank highly in SERPs.

Here’s how you can quickly create a blog outline that has the highest potential to rank in SERP with Outranking’s blog outline generator:

Use tons of internal links between web pages

Internal linking is a strategy that improves readability, rankings for keywords, and Google’s ability to crawl your site. Internal links should be deep in order to improve the quality of content and relevant topics.

When building URLs for your website, it’s important to make sure they are friendly and easy to read. One key to SEO is to make your URLs as specific as possible. Being more specific with your URLs can help you get higher rankings in Google search results.

Most links between web pages should be internal references. Internal links should be within the same page or to a different page on the same website. Good hyperlinks can help improve SEO for your site and make it more efficient for users. URLs with spaces in them can cause issues, so avoid using them. Try to have at most three levels of internal links on any single web page.

Use SEO H1 tags for headings to make important information stand out on a webpage. Avoid using URLs that are too long or contain special characters.

We explain how to use the internal linking feature in Outranking in this video clip:

Learn how to do schema markup

Schema markup is the process of adding structured data to your pages in order to increase the relevancy of your content to search engines and thus improve the accuracy of your search results.

Schema markup is designed to provide search engines with information about your content so that they can better understand it and provide more accurate and relevant results to your users.

There is no shortcut to learning how to do schema markup; this process takes time and effort, but in the end, there are huge benefits. This is a way to jump ahead of the competition, and it is worth your time.

SEO is often over-complicated when it doesn’t have to be. Google provides popular search terms that are good for optimization. All you need is common sense and the right tools.

Use images and visuals

It is important to use images and visuals when designing your landing page. The copy on the landing page is meant to persuade users, so it must be easy to read and understand. Time on-page is an important user signal that influences SEO rankings.

Your copy needs to be concise and clear to be persuasive. Make sure that it can be easily understood. Include multimedia, such as images, videos, and GIFs, to illustrate your points and break up walls of text.

Optimize off-page performance by building backlinks

If you’ve ever done any SEO research, you’ve probably come across the term “backlinks.” And if you’re like most people, you may have wondered what they are and why they’re so important. Here’s everything you need to know about backlinks and how to get them for your website.

First of all, let’s start with a definition: A backlink is simply a link from another website to your own. Backlinks are important because they’re a major factor in determining a website’s ranking on search engines. The higher a website ranks, the more visibility it will have and the more traffic it will receive.

It’s important that you find who’s linking out to your competitors, find a way to replicate those links, and then link back out with your own content. It may sound like repetitive work, but it allows the search engines an opportunity to see what other people are sharing about you. This increases their knowledge of how popular or well-known you are, which is a good thing.

Outranking AI SEO and writing platform is walking you step by step how many links your content needs to rank on the first page based on how many backlinks competitive articles have. Here’s what it looks like:

Building more backlinks over time

So how do you get backlinks? The quickest way to get started is to use a tool called Link Intersect. With Link Intersect, you can see who’s linking to multiple competitors but not you. This is valuable information because it shows who is linking to your competitors and not you.

Once you know who your competitors are getting links from, you can start replicating their backlinks. This is the easiest way to get started because it doesn’t require any special skills or knowledge. You simply need to find a website that’s already linking to your competitor and ask them to link to your website as well.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to link building. There are many different strategies you can use, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The strategies mentioned here are a good place to start if you’re new to link building.

Building backlinks over time is a cornerstone of SEO. Internal linking still has its place, but it’s important to focus on getting external links in order to get better rankings and increase your page rank. The quickest way to do this is by using tools that provide keywords you can use to build new backlinks at the click of a button.

By trying new approaches and experimenting with different strategies for gaining these off-page connections over time, you can successfully optimize this process.

To learn how to build more backlinks using guest posting, check out the webinar we hosted with the founder of Postage a link building and outreach tool:

Increase traffic through social media sharing

Links are like votes for your website, and they are a major ranking factor that boosts organic traffic. The best way to earn links is by targeting people in specific industries. Promoting pages to industry members can also help increase rankings and traffic.

You can increase exposure for your content by sharing it on social media. B2B companies typically focus on Twitter and LinkedIn, with Facebook in the mix as well. If you have attractive images, add Instagram or Pinterest to the list of social media platforms to share your content on. You should use YouTube if you’re open to creating videos.

Do guest posting and build authority

Guest posting is a type of content marketing in which content is created to educate and inform potential consumers with the objective of generating leads and closing sales. Content marketing can be done through guest posting or by building authority. Quality content helps you do your own SEO by increasing traffic while also improving SEO ranking quality. Backlinks are a sign that your website has been well received on the internet, which means some search engines will give more credit to websites with a lot of backlinks.

Guest posting builds authority and can be done through personal blog posts, or by submitting an article that is well researched and written as a guest post to another website. The benefit of guest posting is that it can help build credibility in the eyes of search engines like Google.

How to write SEO content using Outranking?

Here’s a 2-minute video showing how to create SEO-optimized content using the AI SEO content generator Outranking.io

How to optimize content using Outranking?

Here’s a video showing how to optimize long-form content for SEO using Outranking’s step by step on-page optimization tool: